beginning "Turn again, Whittington." Buz, buz, buz: bum, bum, bum:
wheeze, wheeze, wheeze: feu, feu, feu: tinky, tinky, tinky: _craunch_. I
shall certainly come to be damned at last. I have been getting drunk for
two days running. I find my moral sense in the last stage of a
consumption, and my religion burning as blue and faint as the tops of
evening bricks. Hell gapes and the Devil's great guts cry cupboard for
me. In the midst of this infernal torture, Conscience (and be damn'd to
her), is barking and yelping as loud as any of them.

I have sat down to read over again, and I think I do begin to spy out
something with beauty and design in it. I perfectly accede to all your
alterations, and only desire that you had cut deeper, when your hand was
in.

In the next edition of the "Anthology" (which Phoebus avert and those
nine other wandering maids also!) please to blot out _gentle-hearted_,
and substitute drunken: dog, ragged-head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed,
stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the
gentleman in question. And for Charles read Tom, or Bob, or Richard _for
more delicacy_. Damn you, I was beginning to forgive you and believe in
earnest that the lugging in of my proper name was purely unintentional
on your part, when looking back for further conviction, stares me in the
face _Charles Lamb of the India House. Now_ I am convinced it was all
done in malice, heaped sack-upon-sack, congregated, studied malice. You
Dog! your 141st page shall not save you. I own I was just ready to
acknowledge that there is a something not unlike good poetry in that
page, if you had not run into the unintelligible abstraction-fit about
the manner of the Deity's making spirits perceive his presence. God, nor
created thing alive, can receive any honour from such thin show-box
attributes.